The new Scots Makar with a fellow poet whose birthday
is celebrated today
Politics
What did they expect?
Robin Downie
Alex Salmond was recently on ‘Desert Island Discs’. The Herald’s radio critic, Anne Simpson, found him ‘predictable’ and ‘touristy tartan’. The predictability seemed to consist in his regrets about not spending more time with his mother and the ‘touristy tartan’ in the Scottish and perhaps sentimental bias in his choice of records.
Anne Simpson drew the conclusion that the point of all this was to please the punters, and she suggested that perhaps people in positions which depend on public favour should be excluded from programmes of that sort, presumably because they would all be predictable. Of course, if predictability is a bad thing perhaps radio (and other) critics should also be dropped because what they say is also often predictable. It was certainly predictable that Alex Salmond’s choice of record would be criticised whatever he chose. I didn’t like it myself, but it was his choice (as we say).
The issue which emerges here is our ambivalent attitudes to predictability and its sibling, consistency. Suppose Alex Salmond had chosen exclusively Latin American music. Now that would not have been predictable or ‘touristy tartan’, but the very same critics would still have hammered him. How can you be first minister of Scotland and not include Scottish music? This is a trivial example of a more fundamental problem of predictability and consistency.
In many contexts, especially the political, we want consistency and therefore predictability in word and deed. Political parties, currently the Lib-Dems, are under heavy attack for saying one thing in their manifesto and pre-election speeches and doing quite another in coalition. How can we trust them in future if their policies in power are not predictable from their manifesto or pre-election speeches? So goes the current criticism.
Side by side with the general point of consistency goes the political sin of the U-turn. We can all remember the strident voice of Mrs Thatcher at the Tory Party conference in 1980: ‘To those waiting with bated breath for the favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning!’ (The phrase is now well-known, but not everyone knows the Christopher Fry play from which the phrase is derived: ‘The Lady’s not for Burning’.)
When we realise that we are on the wrong road a U-turn is desirable, if sometimes dangerous.
Politicians go to great lengths to deny the U-turn. Even the once saintly Vince Cable has used bizarre arguments to try to convince us that really he has been quite consistent. It seems then that politicians and the public alike want consistency and predictability and disapprove of U-turns and the ‘loose cannon’. Indeed, more generally outside politics we like to know where we are with someone, and we want our friends to be dependable (ie predictable).
But there is another side to this, or several other sides. At a trivial level we can find some sorts of predictable behaviour tedious or irritating. Some marriages founder on the endless tedium of predictable behaviour, such as the predictable joke over the breakfast table or the predictable anecdote. On the other hand, sometimes what is predictable is funny, as when in slapstick comedies we laugh when we know in advance that a character is going to trip or fall down the coal hole, but equally we laugh at the unpredictable, as when five slim fairies wearing green dance out of the wings and are followed by one fat fairy in red.
More seriously, we sometimes want politicians to be inconsistent in the sense that we want them to learn from their mistakes. One current criticism of Ed Balls is that it was his advice which led to insufficient regulation of banks and other mistaken policies of the last Labour government. We expect (hope) that he might re-consider some of this in the light of its disastrous outcome. If this is inconsistent with what he advised previously then so be it. When we realise that we are on the wrong road a U-turn is desirable, if sometimes dangerous.
There is a frightening saying that to learn from experience is to be able to recognise the same mistake when you make it again. Let us hope that this is not how Ed Balls will learn from experience. It is another matter how changes in policy are explained. Disraeli gives a tip here: ‘I never deny; I never contradict; I sometimes forget’.
Robin Downie is emeritus professor of moral philosophy at
Glasgow University